Thanks to Casper, we all know what a ghost looks like. It's your one-minute fancy-dress costume of choice: throw on a sheet, paint on some eyes and get ready to make woo-woo noises when asked. It is that image â of a person in a sheet â that was David Lowery's starting point for A Ghost Story.
What is remarkable is that he manages to turn that joke-shop image into something moving and melancholic, a real-world reflection on what it means to die, to be remembered and to be part of the great passing of time. Even though all we're looking at, when push comes to shove, is Casey Affleck wearing a sheet. At least, we think it's Casey Affleck.
![Rooney Mara plays a grieving woman in A Ghost Story.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170725055330im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/x/d/9/h/4/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gxd9f6.png/1500710480176.jpg)
Lowery says he had that image swirling around in his mind for a long time, waiting for a story where it would fit. "It's always a very strong image, a very strong shape," he says. He likes hand-made things; the sheet-ghost has an appealing simplicity. And because we can see it and we know who it once was, it is sympathetic rather than scary. "There is something sad and beautiful about the physical representation of a ghost being stuck in a physical space. I imagine it would be a very lonely and sad existence."
A Ghost Story was only supposed to be a small film: Lowery's low-budget respite after making Pete's Dragon for Disney. Any big studio film â even one as enjoyable as he says Pete's Dragon was to make â brings with it huge stresses about money, cast and the studio's reputation. A Ghost Story, by contrast, had a script of only 30 pages, a mere handful of locations and a very short shoot. Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara, who worked with Lowery on Ain't Them Bodies Saints (2013), were keen to play the central couple, simply called C and M.
![Casey Affleck, minus the white sheet, in A Ghost Story.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170725055330im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/x/d/9/h/j/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gxd9f6.png/1500710480176.jpg)
C and M are about to move house. She is upbeat about cutting loose; he is resentful and anxious. The day they plan to leave, he is killed in a car accident. We see her go to the hospital to identify his body, numb with grief. What she cannot know is that he remains invisibly present, unable to comfort her, to speak, even to do much in the world without working hands. For years, maybe centuries, he scrabbles impotently at a crack in the skirting where he has seen her leave a note when she eventually moves out of their home. Because it is not his beloved wife he is condemned to haunt; it is the house he never wanted to abandon. Occasionally, the ghost treats new residents to a bit of petulant plate-smashing, but most of its endless time is spent in silence.
It is Affleck under that sheet â most of the time, anyway â but they realised after a few days' shooting that his most important job was to disappear. "I thought his physical traits would be pronounced; that he could use his body language more than he usually does," Lowery says. "But it just wasn't working. We found that, if he's recognisable, the sheet doesn't have the same illusion; it's just a sheet draped over an actor's head. We needed the ghost to function as an entity unto itself."
This meant that the sheet costume was no longer simple. It had to be bulked out with petticoats and tulle so it wouldn't get tangled up with Affleck's body; he also had to wear a mask over his head so that the "eyes" â he actually couldn't see anything â would sit squarely. He moved seldom and only when instructed. It hardly sounds like acting at all.
![A Ghost Story turns a joke-shop image into something moving.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170725055330im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/x/d/9/h/g/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gxd9f6.png/1500710480176.jpg)
"But he was excited by the idea of subjugating himself to this experience; he's not your classic Oscar winner by any means," says Lowery. "He's always skewed towards more experimental ideas in his films." He was upset when they had to do pick-ups during editing with someone else under the costume. "He wanted it to be all him."
Lowery himself spent much of the shoot convinced it wouldn't work at all, so he was taken aback when A Ghost Story became the great break-out hit of this year's Sundance festival. "It was so high-concept. Normally I trust that at least I will have an actor who gives a great performance or cinematography that has a nice wide-screen sheen to it, but here I was taking away all my usual safety nets by putting a sheet over the actor's head and shooting in an aspect ratio that was very unforgiving." The film is shot in Academy ratio, which means the image is almost square and framed on the screen by black space. "I really wasn't doing myself any favours, but people were moved by it in a way I hadn't expected."
![Director David Lowery has been surprised by the reaction to his film.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170725055330im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/x/d/9/g/d/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gxd9f6.png/1500710480176.jpg)
Until then, the film had felt entirely personal. The genesis of the story was a terrible argument Lowery had with his wife about moving house, when she wanted to stay in Los Angeles after Pete's Dragon was completed and he wanted to move back to their state of origin, Texas.
"I find myself very attached to physical spaces," he says. "If I live somewhere for any amount of time, I will put down roots and invest myself in that space. The very first home I ever moved out of, I remember being just heartbroken I had to leave this house I had defined as my own at seven years old." A haunted house story was a ready-made template, with a set of rules understood by anyone who has seen a few horror movies, to explore that deep-rooted neediness.
"To me the movie is about the need to let go," Lowery says. "Of all sorts of things, but particularly whatever might be holding one back in life." This is never spelt out, however. "I like a film where the audience can bring their own baggage to it and process whatever is going on in their own lives, using those emotions or feelings or fears to synthesise whatever is happening on screen. I don't want to make statements with my movies because I'm not certain enough about anything. I am still working so many things out in my own life and I expect I always will."
In a key scene, an obnoxious party guest "a little too high on his intellectual superiority" bores everyone with his views on legacy; we are driven to make art, he says, because we can't bear to be forgotten, for our existences to have counted for nothing.
"Whether it's obnoxious or frustrating, there is a truth to it," says Lowery. "When I was writing it, I was putting forward my own thought processes in a very real-time fashion." Loitering as a ghost means that at least you won't disappear entirely. You may even be able to jiggle the furniture.
Is it Lowery's fantasy? He laughs. "I think that would be a real bummer! To have to stick around in one place, unable to communicate with anyone; I think it would be a very lonely existence," he says. "But our egos enjoy imagining that possibility, because it allows us to transcend our own inevitable deaths. We need to let go of our egos and move on to whatever's next. But while we are living on earth it's very difficult to do that. It's very difficult for me personally to wrap my head around the idea of not being around."
A Ghost Story opens on July 27.